Monday, January 12, 2009

Day 12 of 365 - Spooky

I'm having so much fun with my project that I've decided I'm just going to play with different techniques until something strikes my fancy and holds me for a time. Today I played with long exposure and the "ghosting" effect. I couldn't decide which one to post so today is a twofer day.

I originally thought I would need to use a ND4 filter because it light enough to still read by but the first few photos were almost completely black even at a 20 second exposure. I removed the filter and discovered a new issue...just how do you focus on a subject that you can hardly see through the viewfinder. So a few pictures later and a little commonsense thrown in I found the right focus. I set the camera to manual, exposure to bulb and my f/stop to 8 and focal length of 38mm. What I wanted to do was work with motion in a long exposure setting. As I've mentioned before this old Army base has a story to tell and there just may be some ghosts wandering around. I used my boots as my focal point and locked my shutter release open while I moved down to stand in front of the boots. Stood for about 10 seconds and then moved to the first step and stood for a few seconds and so on until I got to the top. The shutter was open for a total of 61 seconds.

No motion in this photo as I just stood in front of the boots. I used the same settings as above but the shutter was only open for 47 seconds. Because of the background light I wasn't sure if this would work and I wonder if I had left the shutter open much longer if I would have disappeared from view entirely.

About Me

I've dabbled with many different art mediums over the years and always felt drawn to photography over the others. I was always frustrated with my attempts at film photography so it wasn't until my 40th b-day when my wife and my parents went in on a DSLR for me did I really get into it.

It took doing a 365 Project in 2009 for me to find my creative side. I took over 17,000 photos in that year and posted at least one a day to my photoblog. To make myself learn how to take a better photo I decided to not use Photoshop or any other editing system the entire year. I felt that I relied far to much on Photoshop and spent more time fixing photos than taking them. I concluded the year shooting full manual and learned to see in ways I never would have otherwise.